| Readability and Book Sales |
| If your book is part of the Search Inside feature on Amazon.com, you might be able to get some incredible statistics about your book, including its reading level, word count, average words per sentence, % of complex words, and words per dollar (based on the retail price of your book). If you'd like to read an interesting post comparing books by Malcolm Gladwell, Seth Godin, and a few other authors, go here: http://www.stevenberlinjohnson.com/2007/10/ this-may-be-old.html?cid=87592892#comment-87592892.  Perhaps the most interesting feature of the above post is how books with fewer average words per sentence and a smaller % of complex words sell better. In other words, if you write shorter sentences and use less complex words, you have a greater chance of becoming a bestselling author. Interesting. Labels: Amazon.com, Malcolm Gladwell. bestselling author, readability, reading level, search inside, Seth Godin, word counts |
posted by John Kremer @
9:38 PM
2 comments |
John Kremer's Ten Million Eyeballs Internet Marketing Event
2 Comments:
Hi,
As to your last comment; I think that most people don't like things to be over their head. I once read a book that one third was in French mostly qoutes, and I had no idea what I was missing and wished I had a French to English book.
Maybe people feel that the larger words are just so much Greek or French to them?
Janice~
Too bad that so many things are over the reader's head. As a former English teacher now a writer, I despair at the state of the educational system that produces readers who don't understand words of more than one syllable. As to French quotes or Italian quotes or whatever, there are common quotes that everyone should know -- such as "vini, vidi, vici" -- Julius Caesar's famous quote of "I came, I saw, I conquered."
Sharon
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